Message services is the term used to collectively identify the various office automation systems associated with a telephone switching system. These systems are used to improve the productivity of the white collar worker in an office environment by providing an asynchronous voice (or short text message) communication medium.
The Voice Mail Service (VMS) system is one example of these message services. The voice mail service system offers two distinct communication features: Voice Mailbox (VM) and Call Answering (CA). The voice mailbox feature involves a telephone user calling the voice mail service system by dialing an access code using the touch-tone pad on the station set, identifying one or more message recipients who are also connected to the PBX by dialing their station numbers using the touch-tone pad, and leaving a voice message for later delivery by the voice mail service system to the designated recipients. The delivery of the voice message may be immediate or at a scheduled time specified by the message originator. The delivery is passive in that the vocie mail service system places the message in a mailbox assigned to each identified recipient and activates the recipient's message waiting indicator instead of actively calling the recipient to playback the message. The recipient may then access the voice mail service system to save the message for subsequent action, listen to the message, delete it, append comments and route the message to other recipients, or reply and return the message to the originator.
The call answering feature of voice mail service is geared to the convenience of the message recipient, unlike the voice mailbox feature that is geared towards aiding the message originator. The nonavailability of an individual to answer a telephone call results in that call being redirected to the voice mail service system call answering feature. The caller receives a prerecorded message from the absent individual or a system-provided prerecorded message and can then leave a voice message in the absent individual's voice mailbox.
The difficulty with existing voice mail service systems is that a user must query this system as well as all the other message service systems to locate and retrieve all messages. In the case where the user's telephone station set is equipped with a single message waiting indicator, the lighted indicator indicates only that any one or more of the message services contains an unretrieved message. The user must still poll all message services to locate and retrieve these messages.